Demand for a more secure network switching infrastructure has increased with the proliferation of mobile and/or untethered computing devices (such as supervisory control and data access (SCADA) systems, industrial control systems, transportation systems, smartphones, tablet computers, set-top boxes, and hotspot devices). Applications and web browsers running on such devices and over such an infrastructure may be susceptible to attacks by malicious agents at a resource level, or at a resource flow level (such as eavesdropping, key loggers, worms, viruses, Trojan horses, or spoofing attacks). While security experts have developed increasingly complex means of securing traffic flow (such as networking protocols, encryption tunnels, and key generation and authentication systems), the challenge remains to secure a transaction from its origination on a client device to its destination behind a switch, while providing a means for non-repudiation.
The field of network security also shares the common goals of confidentiality, integrity, and availability. Confidentiality in network security solutions may be compromised in systems that administer and transfer keys. These systems may rely on physical access to a certification authority, a connection that may not be supported or maintained by mobile clients using a wide area network (WAN). Furthermore, in systems implementing a network layer socket management service, malware may install itself at the operating system, network, transport, or application layer and redirect traffic to malicious servers.
In addition, network security switches and routers may adopt a blacklist approach to prevent malicious agents from connecting to a network and compromising the security of the network. However, a blacklist may implement a draconian set of rules or regular expressions to locate and filter out malicious traffic. To circumvent this, a malicious agent may simply change a single bit to evade the most sophisticated traffic management and malware detection system.